Astronaut Tim Peake took 2kg of rocket seeds to the International Space Station, which will now be planted by UK schoolchildren.
Photograph: European Space Agency

Space, as Trekkies know, is the final frontier. For years people have dreamed of boldly going beyond Earth’s orbit to explore other worlds and scientists are closer than ever before to launching the first human mission to Mars. But with the journey time taking as long as 300 days, one of the biggest challenges is keeping the crew alive during the trip. Now experts are turning to UK schoolchildren to help reveal the secret of sustaining life in space.

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Scientists hope that by collecting such a large data sample they will be able to further understand how factors such as zero gravity and the lack of micro-organisms in the soil, air and water affect plant growth and development. That will, in turn, help them identify which crops will be the best to grow in a “space garden”, providing a sustainable source of food for astronauts and, by transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen, even air for Martian explorers to breathe.

Each participating school will receive a blue packet of seeds and a red packet of seeds but will not know which one has been to space. The two batches will be planted separately and grown in trays on classroom windowsills, with students recording the number of leaves and growth on a wall chart provided with instructions from the RHS. The experiment, lasting 35 days, will begin after the Easter holidays and at the end students will go online and report the data collected. Once the numbers have been crunched the results will be published in September 2016.

Sale high school in Manchester has applied to take part. Chris Britton, the school’s key stage 3 science coordinator, believes the experiment will provide an exciting opportunity to develop students’ understanding of a wide range of curriculum topics, from photosynthesis to plant hormones. Most importantly, he says, working on something to which neither the teachers nor the experts know the outcome will bring back the wonder of discovery to science lessons.

“There is still an enthusiasm for science but something like this will catalyse that interest,” he says. “For a lot of students these days, if they don’t know something they can look it up on the internet. But because this experiment has never been done before, there is nothing out there that they can type into Google. It will hopefully engage them that bit more.”

The simplicity of the experiment means even younger children can engage with the project. Luckington community school in Wiltshire has been running a school gardening club for around five years and jumped at the chance to get involved.

Key stage 1 teacher Vanessa Newman says they intend to use a video of Tim Peake with the seeds in space as a starting point, then ask children to use their imagination and hypothesise the outcomes of the experiment.

She says: “We are looking at what we have on our planet that helps us grow things and asking the students whether they think the seeds which were sent into space would be the same compared with if they had stayed on Earth. It is nice because you are starting from their perspective on what they think is going to happen and then actually doing the experiment.

“Our approach will be much more simplified but very comparative – predicting what we think is going to happen then actually planting the seeds, growing them and then looking at the differences such as the colour, taste and size. It will be very visual.”

While it is the first time rocket has been experimented on in this way, astronauts have been growing fauna in space since the 80s, when Russian cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev successfully cultivated an arabidopsis plant using a laptop sized greenhouse. Since then, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have grown vegetables including lettuce, peas and radishes. The ESA has also experimented with a type of algae called spirulina that is not only highly nutritious but can be used to break down human waste and recycle it into fresh oxygen via photosynthesis.

You therefore don’t need a packet of seeds from outer space to explore the subject of space gardening. The UK Space Agency website has a galaxy of ideas for cross-curricular lessons to inspire the next generation of green fingered cosmonauts.

Primary resources include an activity planning and creating a school “astro garden” of fruit and vegetables to feed a hungry astronaut, a lesson discussing the essential role plants play in the future of space exploration and a project to design and make a model of a greenhouse suitable for growing crops on Mars.

Jeremy Curtis, head of education and skills at the UK Space Agency, says that this last point is a key challenge for space gardeners – transporting heavy bags of compost from Earth is not practical, particularly on a future long distance mission. Scientists therefore prefer to use a type of lightweight wool material that easily absorbs water and feeds the plant’s roots. Schools can test this for themselves using fibrous media such as those used in hydroponics – a method of growing plants without soil.

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Curtis says that while it is impossible to mimic zero gravity in school, you can try to replicate the sterile atmosphere of a spacecraft by growing plants in a bottle garden, a method of growing that reduces the plant’s exposure to the outside environment.

While the topic is an easy win for teachers looking to fire the imagination of students of all ages and inspire them with science – as well as even horticulture – this has real potential for schools to further their knowledge of gardening in space and help one day send humans to Mars.

Dr Christophe Lasseur, the ESA’s coordinator of life support, says: “If you want garden in space you will have to do a lot of research to make sure that the environment for the plant is more or less known or controlled. Unlike on Earth, in space everything has to be artificial. You therefore need to develop another way of thinking which will give you a new approach to traditional gardening.

“If we are able to get more statistics from the experiments done by the schools on this topic, it is maybe not the top level of science that we could do at the professional level of laboratories, but it doesn’t matter. We want to see what we can learn, no matter how little.”

It’s free to register your school to take part in this national experiment but be quick, seed packets are limited.

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